THE POLITICO IS NOT HAPPY: RFK Jr.’s billionaire running mate is making a comedy about the pandemic.
Covid contrarians tight with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. are pitching Hollywood on an unlikely leading man: National Institutes of Health Director Jay Bhattacharya.
Nicole Shanahan, Kennedy’s running mate in the 2024 presidential campaign, is searching for investors to fund a movie that pokes fun at the pandemic response with a star based on Bhattacharya, who rose to prominence with his anti-lockdown manifesto and relentless tweets opposing social distancing.
The script for the satirical comedy, “The Rash,” is by renowned author Walter Kirn, who wrote the novel “Up in the Air” that became an Oscar-nominated movie starring George Clooney. The new Kirn screenplay stars a “no-nonsense” public health professor at a Stanford-like California university — mirroring Bhattacharya — who speaks out against mass hysteria amid a mysterious outbreak of a contagious skin condition.
I’m not at all sure that this is the team to be making it or if the results will be watchable, but given how elites acted and continually reversed their decisions in 2020, there’s a huge opportunity for a black humor comedy along the lines of Dr. Strangelove, Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H or The Death of Stalin.
Fauci and Birx as James Bond supervillains, lockdown obsessives having trysts, cocktail parties – and sex parties – celebrities singing “Imagine” from their mansions, newspapers siccing social media mobs on those celebrities who refused to go along with lockdowns and vaccine mandates, healthcare officials who pivoted on a dime from lockdowns to championing riots in the street – there’s so much material here to mine.